A credit rating that an agency assigned but the rated entity declined to accept, so that it was never used, and which the agency discloses separately on its website rather than through an ordinary press release.
The category exists because the rating process begins at the issuer’s request: the issuer mandates the agency, the agency’s committee assigns a rating, and the issuer then accepts it or does not. Where the issuer does not, the assignment still happened — and SEBI requires credit rating agencies to disclose unaccepted ratings on their websites, so the fact of the assignment is not simply allowed to vanish.
What the disclosure typically shows
A list, maintained by each agency on its own site, identifying the entity, the instrument or facility, the rating assigned, and the relevant date. It is a register rather than a rationale: there is ordinarily no accompanying press release of the kind an accepted rating action produces, and no rating drivers, financials or lender-wise annexure attached.
Why it matters to a credit reader
Non-acceptance is information. The most common reading is that the assigned rating was lower than the issuer hoped, and the issuer declined it — possibly to seek a better outcome from another agency. Where a borrower’s published rating at one agency coexists with an unaccepted rating at another, especially a lower one at a similar date, that pattern is the observable trace of rating shopping, and the disclosure regime exists precisely so a reader can see it.
The register is worth checking whenever a rating looks freshly established at an agency that is new to the borrower: the unaccepted lists at the other agencies may explain how it got there.
Where it sits relative to this corpus
An honest boundary: unaccepted-rating disclosures are website registers, not rating press releases, and they sit outside the press-release corpus that this product’s headline figures describe. A borrower’s unaccepted ratings are not among its rating actions here, and no count on Coverage includes them. The registers remain checkable at each agency’s own site.
Related
- Rating rationale — the document an accepted rating action produces, and this one does not
- Rating withdrawal — the other way a rating relationship ends
- Issuer not cooperating — non-cooperation after acceptance, a different signal
- Coverage — what the corpus figures do and do not describe
- Glossary index